What Will We Actually Do On the Moon?

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What Will We Actually Do On the Moon?

• Brent Sherwood
• brent.sherwood_at_jpl.nasa.gov
• New Brunswick
• June, 2007

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Purpose

• Demonstrate a method of communicating about the
  Vision for Space Exploration that could begin
  motivating the public to support it

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Global Lunar Strategy

• NASA catalyzed global lunar-exploration planning

• March 2006 workshop with 200 participants in
  seven teams
• Open RFI
• Gap-filling reviews by 10 NASA centers, 14
  international space agencies, two commerce
  roundtables, young-professional and advocacy
  interest groups, MEPAG, LEAG

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Global Lunar Strategy Dec 2006

• 800 ideas about what to do on the Moon

• Yielded 188 discrete objectives
• 6 themes about why

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Theme Mapping

• Orange Team 3/06
• Enable increasingly sophisticated lunar
  activities
• Conduct science to gain new knowledge
• Improve the human condition
• Provide economic growth
• Enable deeper exploration of the solar system
• Ultimately establish human settlements off Earth

• Global Strategy 12/06
• Scientific knowledge
• Global partnerships
• Public engagement
• Economic expansion
• Exploration preparation
• Human civilization

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Two Techniques

• Future history as a story
• Specific vignettes that provide glimpses

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Pocket Guide to Lunar Activity

• First we will reinstate the capability to land
  people there, sustain them for a few days, and
  return them. This time, we will not be
  fundamentally restricted to Nearside,
  near-equatorial sites. Small crews will explore
  their surroundings, collect samples, set up
  simple surface systems (for power,
  communications, and scientific and engineering
  experiments), and learn how their equipment
  really operates. We will use simple rovers to
  explore regions surrounding the landing site. We
  will use remote sensing and surface exploration
  to seek unique places where useful materials or
  scientific phenomena are concentrated.
• After determining where it makes sense to put
  down roots, we will bring larger habitation and
  workshop elements, and construct radiation
  shields around them using assembled structure
  elements and lunar regolith. We will commission
  power plants that can operate through the
  two-week night time. We will explore the strange
  regions where permanent shadow and near-permanent
  sunlight are close together, where there may be
  ice resources, and locations on the Farside where
  Earth is never directly visible. We will grade
  and pave the surface locally to make it safer,
  cleaner, and more predictable for people, mobile
  equipment and automated machines to operate.
  Crew members will begin to specialize
  experiments, exploration, construction,
  housekeeping, jury-rigging, and repair.
• Among the engineering experiments will be some
  that test practical ways of operating,
  constructing, excavating, beneficiating, and
  ultimately producing useful products from lunar
  material oxygen for propellant and life support
  masonry, glass, and iron for making things
  nitrogen and other light elements for air and
  nutrients. We will learn how to cultivate,
  protect, and harvest plants and animals. We will
  try a wide variety of solutions to these
  challenges, selecting and scaling up the ones
  that work well.
• We will establish test sites where we can
  practice techniques being designed to explore
  near-Earth asteroids and Mars. We will build
  research facilities that Earthbound scientists
  use by proxy to perform unique astronomical
  observations, or uniquely dangerous experiments.
  If it turns out to be economically sensible, we
  will establish large-scale production of
  lunar-derived propellants and construction
  materials to enable cis-lunar development, and
  large-scale generation of energy for Earth. We
  will build destinations on the Moon for business
  and leisure visitors. Eventually the scale and
  viability of these activities will cross the
  threshold that defines settlement, and humanity
  will become a two-planet species.

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Scenario Vignettes

• The details double-paradox
• Painting the pictureeven without pictures!
• The value of novelty
• Get professional help to excite non-nerds

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Eleven Vignettes
Enable increasingly sophisticated lunar activities Pave for dust control
Enable increasingly sophisticated lunar activities Establish a colony of continuously active robots
Enable increasingly sophisticated lunar activities Kitchen science
Enable increasingly sophisticated lunar activities Designer biology
Enable increasingly sophisticated lunar activities Tend the machinery
Conduct science to gain new knowledge Search for pieces of ancient Earth
Conduct science to gain new knowledge Build simple observatories that open new wavelength regimes
Improve the human condition Establish a virtual real-time network to enable public engagement
Provide economic growth Institute a public-private lunar development corporation
Enable solar system exploration Rehearse planetary protection protocols for Mars
Establish human settlements off Earth Expand life and intelligence beyond Earth
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Eleven Vignettes
Enable increasingly sophisticated lunar activities Pave for dust control
Enable increasingly sophisticated lunar activities Establish a colony of continuously active robots
Enable increasingly sophisticated lunar activities Kitchen science
Enable increasingly sophisticated lunar activities Designer biology
Enable increasingly sophisticated lunar activities Tend the machinery
Conduct science to gain new knowledge Search for pieces of ancient Earth
Conduct science to gain new knowledge Build simple observatories that open new wavelength regimes
Improve the human condition Establish a virtual real-time network to enable public engagement
Provide economic growth Institute a public-private lunar development corporation
Enable solar system exploration Rehearse planetary protection protocols for Mars
Establish human settlements off Earth Expand life and intelligence beyond Earth
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Enable increasingly sophisticated lunar
activities
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Pave for dust control

• Lunar regolith hard vacuum !
• Design around mitigation of bad effects
• Pave roadways and work areas
• Grade, then stabilize
• Compaction vs. using the natural resource
• Paving alternatives
• Compacted gravel
• Paving blocks
• Direct sintering
• Imagine an investigation that prototypes various
  methods to determine what works best to control
  dust

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Establish a colony of continuously active robots

• Kurzweil singularity what will we expect of
  robots by 2025?
• Benefit-to-cost ratio
• Human extension and enhancement
• How much of an outpost could be built
  robotically?
• Shape a predictable environment
• Establish, verify routine operations
• Build radiation shelters
• Remote, dynamic construction site
• Productivity
• Public interest
• No downtime during, between human visits
• Imagine looking in on a robotic colony as it
  changes every day

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Kitchen science

• How normal processes work on the Moon, and
  affect routine activities
• Convection, mixing, drainage, evaporation
• The practical things
• How to cook, how to clean, how to live
• Must be done in situ
• Investigations akin to play
• Inherently interesting defining a new way for
  humans to live
• Make it personal what do you do every dayand
  how will we learn to do these things on the Moon?

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Designer biology

• 1960s quiz Which will occur first?
• Transgenic and knockout mice
• DNA fingerprinting as admissible evidence
• Cloned pets
• Moon base
• What biological miracles will be common by
  2030?
• Plants and animals optimized for lunar conditions
• Hard radiation, low atmospheric pressure,
  different partial pressures, long dark periods,
  strong ultraviolet, economical geometry, alien
  soil, nutrient concentration
• Imagine a laboratory on the Moon devoted to
  developing a novel lunar ecology that meets our
  needs

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Tend the machinery

• You think YOU spend weekends working on your
  house
• Economics will drive routine lunar ops to be
  machine-mediated
• Highest and best uses of humans
• Exploration
• Jury-rigging new solutions
• Maintenance and repair
• Shirtsleeve workshop will emerge as critical need
• Long night-time, diurnal rhythm
• Imagine the public appeal when tending grows to
  include husbandry of living things

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Conduct science to gain new knowledge
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Search for pieces of ancient Earth

• Oldest Earth rocks miss the first 1/5 of Earth
  history
• Tectonic recycling, weathering obliterate the
  record
• Lunar environment preserves solar system history
• If SNCs could come from Mars to Earth
• Lunar regolith must contain Earth rocks
• How would we recognize them?
• Imagine a scientific campaign using robots,
  humans, searches, modeling, sample recovery, and
  in situ and terrestrial lab analysis to gain
  insight into the missing history of Earth

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Observatories to open new wavelength regimes

• Every new wavelength window has yielded new
  discoveries about how the universe works
• Space flight opened several windows above Earths
  atmosphere
• Two unexplored windows remain they require both
  a space location and very large detectors
• Low-frequency (? gt 10m) radio
• Large array of simple dipole antennas
• High-energy cosmic rays
• Detector/regolith lasagna
• Imagine robotic preparation and deployment of new
  kinds of observatoriesand imagine new
  discoveries being made

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Improve the human condition
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Virtual real-time network for public engagement

• Voters of 2030 will not be born for another 5
  years
• How much will they share our values?
• Todays media world interests are a click away
• Public will expect to be embedded in humanitys
  lunar adventures via high-fidelity telepresence
• Anytime-broadband infrastructure
• Privacy challenges
• Not Education and Public Outreach
• Digital-wallpaper live feeds of lunar wilderness
  or worksites
• Moonwalks in immersive VR in junior high
• Lunar inhabitant blogs and chat
• Imagine how the issue of relevance will vanish
  as lunar living becomes just another part of our
  daily life

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Provide economic growth
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Public-private lunar development corporation

• Public-private partnership is required to
  jumpstart viable commercial enterprise
• Sparse and frangible business opportunities
• High barriers to entry
• Port authority model
• Insures core service continuity, predictable
  business conditions
• Promotes competitive growth via long-term,
  competitively-awarded service contracts
• Reinvests its own profits to improve the port
  infrastructure
• Accelerate commercial implementation of routine
  services
• Habitation, energy, communications, propellant
  production, consumables resupply, food
  production, waste management, construction,
  maintenance, housekeeping, recycling, security

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Enable solar system exploration
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Planetary protection protocols for Mars

• Mars is very different from the Moon
• Yet, we can design lunar operations to validate
  Mars techniques
• Key feature of human Mars exploration is
  investigation of special areas where life might
  be
• Paradox require human field work, but most
  susceptible to contamination
• Can sub-optimize lunar ops to emulate Mars
  conditions
• Far-side outpost 6-mth orbital loiter 1-yr
  base ops with Mars-type systems 6-mth orbital
  loiter simulation
• Help is days away, rather than months
• Imagine rehearsing protocols for exploring
  special areas
• Sterile robots, habitat gloveboxes, dust control,
  ops procedures

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Establish human settlements off Earth
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Expand life and intelligence beyond Earth

• Über-objective focuses the others
• Long-term purpose
• Operations tailored for permanence, local supply,
  economic growth, self-sufficiency, survival,
  procreation, and new beginnings
• Settlement resonates with people
• A dwarf planet only three days awaywith
  resources
• Opens alternative industrial space futures
• Strategic destination for passenger travel
• Noahs Ark reassurance
• Key architecture and investment decisions
• Reusable hydrogen/oxygen transportation systems
• Sites selected to scale up resource production
• Regenerable life support, genetic modification
• Habitat construction
• Genuine economic development
• Imagine using settlement to focus what we do on
  the Moon now

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What Happens Next?

• More vignettes
• Try this at home
• Engage visionary illustrators
• Doesnt matter if reality is different 25 years
  hence
• Get professional help
• Test-market
• Be bold